The Documents Behind the Decision

Town Council is moving forward with redevelopment of the municipal complex at 205 Claremont Avenue. On August 11, they introduced an ordinance adopting a redevelopment plan, which doesn’t contain the actual plan at all, according to Planning Director Talley (I'll cover this one at a later date).

The Township has characterized the municipal building as deteriorated, obsolete, and unsuitable for continued use.  However, the evidentiary documents produced by the Township do not support this.  

In Part 3 of my Municipal Facilities series, I examine the Township’s source documents (obtained via OPRA request); the ones its redevelopment plan and designating resolution cite as the basis for proceeding. The record does not contain what residents would reasonably expect.

TL;DR

• The technical record supporting that decision rests largely on decades-old reports.

• The last engineers to assess the municipal building did not find serious structural problems.

• The Township has produced no current engineering assessment, updated repair estimate, appraisal, or evidence that the recommended structural monitoring ever occurred.

Estimated read time: 8 minutes

The technical foundation: two reports, both more than twenty years old

The evidentiary basis for redevelopment rests solely on two documents.

A 2002 Needs Assessment by The RBA Group. A space-programming study: departments, staff counts, and square footage. It does not evaluate building condition, structure, or systems. Its conclusion (i.e. “inefficient, overcrowded and outdated”) is about spatial fit; not structural viability. Its five-year projections expired around 2007.

The document reads today like a time capsule with substantial square footage allocated to technologies of a bygone era; including microfiche, typewriters, VCRs, and a coin machine.  Town Council is basing an eight-figure expenditure today on a needs assessment that is 5 years older than the first iPhone.  “The cloud” as a place to store documents was not yet a phrase that anyone used.  It describes a world that no longer exists.

24 years later, and the Township has still not answered the obvious question: what are our needs TODAY?

A 2005 Municipal Buildings Assessment by Staunton Chow, P.C. This is the only professional engineering evaluation of these properties in the entire record, and it is currently old enough to buy alcohol.  It assessed ten Township buildings, including 205 Claremont, system-by-system.  It laid out a clear, capital plan over a phased period and the associated cost that town officials failed to act on for over 2 decades.

Every subsequent document in the record draws on these two. No engineering assessment of the buildings in question has been conducted since, according to the Township's OPRA production.

What the engineers actually found

The 2005 report’s Executive Summary says something the Township has never repeated in public:

“Overall the majority of the buildings and building systems are in fair to good condition.”

For the municipal building, the deficiencies flagged as critical were all repairable.

Investment was genuinely needed.  The engineer highlighted the roof and the HVAC system as the big-ticket items; replaceable systems, not structural failure. The engineer found no structural problem that was considered to be serious, recommending monitoring rather than intervention.  No subsequent, engineering assessment has been performed.

This is a building that needed investment. It is not a building the engineers said could not be saved.

What has been added since 2005

The Planning Department conducted a redevelopment study; the document that drove the designation in 2022.  It is effectively just a summary. It restates the decades-old 2002 and 2005 reports and supplements them with only an interview with the building’s custodian and photographs from a site visit. That is the entirety of what it adds.

It contains no new engineering. It contains no updated repair estimate. And where it does touch cost, it simply restates the 2005 repair figure ($1.6MM) in raw 2005 dollars, seventeen years later, with no adjustment for inflation.

It is a summary of old reports masquerading as analysis. And it moves from “the building has problems” to “the area should be designated for redevelopment” without the step in between: what would it cost to fix, what would it cost to replace, and which better serves residents?

The redevelopment plan introduced on August 11 contains no cost analysis, either.

But what about the "plate separation"?

There is one condition that surfaces whenever this building’s future is discussed, which is the claim that the walls are separating from the floor plates. It is the single most-repeated piece of evidence that the building has structural problems.

Presenting the study to the Planning Board in August of 2022, the Planning Director described how she observed it on a tour of the building with the custodian, noting that you can see where the wall has separated from the floor plate by peeling back carpet.

The study documents the same condition with two photographs. Together with the site visit, this is the entirety of the evidence in the record.

The building has obviously moved. However, the question is what this means, and the only licensed professionals who ever examined the underlying phenomenon answered it. The engineers looked at the settlement directly in 2005:

“The building settlement does not appear to be a serious structural problem at this time but should be further monitored, with wall-mounted crack monitors, and evaluated on a bi-annual basis.”

Crack monitors are relatively inexpensive instruments that record whether movement is progressing or dormant. Read twice a year, they produce a trend line, which is the one thing that separates a building that is failing from a building that settled and has since stopped. The engineers did not say the condition was harmless. They said it needed to be measured over time.

The Township knew that was the missing piece. In the same August 2022 hearing, a board member asked the Township Manager what steps would be taken about the safety concerns being raised. His answer:

“The floor plates will be examined by a structural engineer forthwith.”

That was four years ago. No such examination appears anywhere in the record the Township produced, and neither does any engineering assessment of this building after 2005. Neither does any monitoring readings of the kind the engineers prescribed…

So when the separation is offered today as proof of structural problems, consider what is actually behind that claim: a planner and a custodian pulling back carpet, a couple pictures, a twenty-one-year-old engineering judgment that the settlement was not serious, and a promised structural examination that (so far as the record shows) never happened.

It is entirely possible the movement has continued and the building is in worse shape than the 2005 report describes, but it is equally possible that the building settled over a decade ago and has been stable ever since. A photograph could be consistent with both. Only the measurements the engineers asked for could tell the difference. The Township was told to take them in 2005, said in 2022 it would bring in a structural engineer, and the record contains neither.

The number the Township never published

The 2005 report did something no Township document has done since: it priced the work. Appendix A is a construction cost estimate, deficiency-by-deficiency, building-by-building, phased over a ten-year capital program.

The total for the municipal building was $1.6MM.

The Township filed the report and executed almost none of it. The leaks, mold, and deterioration documented seventeen years later are the predictable result of neglect, and they are now being offered as the reason the building cannot be saved.

Twenty-one years of construction inflation later, the scope of work cited in 2005 would cost roughly $3.4MM for the municipal building, adjusted for inflation using the ENR Building Cost Index, the construction industry’s standard measure. A current scope could cost more, because two decades of deferred maintenance have been added to it. However, nobody knows how much more, because nobody has bothered to check.

Two numbers, both unknown

Some will ask the reasonable question: is the building worth fixing?

The answer to this question has two inputs, and the Township has neither.

The cost of the fix is unknown. The only estimate ever produced is twenty-one years old, and the Township has never updated it. Not in 2022, not for the designation, and not in the plan now before the Planning Board for consistency review...

The value of the building is unknown. There is no appraisal of the municipal building.  Not in the OPRA production, not in the designation record, not anywhere… An appraisal of two buildings takes weeks and costs a table scrap of a rounding error against a decision of this size. In twenty-one years, no one has ordered one.

You can’t conclude a repair isn’t worth making while declining to price the repair. You can’t conclude a building isn’t worth its repair cost while declining to learn what the building is worth. Without either number, “not worth fixing” is not a finding. It’s a feeling, and Montclair is about to make a generational, likely eight-figure set of commitments purely off vibes.

And even those two numbers, once known, are only the beginning of the real analysis.  What it would cost to fix and the after-repair value must ultimately be weighed against what the alternatives cost, whether new construction or, even worse, a long-term lease in Lackawanna Plaza. That comparison does not exist in the record either. It will be the subject of a subsequent piece in this series.

The one current document that nobody has seen

There is only one document in the designation record newer than 2022. Page 1 of the redevelopment plan identifies it: “an update letter prepared by the Planning Department dated May 14, 2026.”

The plan says the designation was based on it. Yet, the Council's designating resolution never mentions it. By its own recitals, the resolution rests entirely on the 2022 record. So, either the designation formally rests on nothing newer than a four-year-old study referencing decades-old analysis, or it rests on a letter the operative resolution doesn't cite and the public has never seen. The letter was prepared by the Planning Department, not by an engineer.

I have requested it under OPRA. When it arrives, residents will be able to judge for themselves how much new analysis stands behind the decision to spend eight-figures of the peoples’ money on a new building.

What should happen before anything else

1. A current needs assessment. The last one dates to 2002.

2. A current engineering/repair estimate. The 2005 report is a great example to follow. Update it.

3. An appraisal. If the question is whether the buildings are worth fixing, someone has to find out what they are worth. The associated cost is nominal.

4. Release the May 14 letter without waiting out the OPRA clock.

None of this is an argument against a new municipal complex. If the analysis supports one, make the case with the analysis. What residents should not be asked to accept is a record that stops in 2005, a question with two unknown inputs, and a conclusion that arrived before either of them.

Evidence before conclusions. Analysis before momentum. Options before outcomes.